Gunpowder Press, with our new partner, Letras Latinas, invites all Latinx poets to submit to the Alta California Chapbook Prize contest. We are excited to welcome this year’s final judge, Raina León.
- Poems may be submitted in English or Spanish (Spanglish is welcome!)
- The selected manuscript will be published in both English and Spanish.
The winning poet will receive $1000.00, publication, and 10 copies of their chapbook, published in a bilingual edition by Gunpowder Press. Enter via Submittable.
Raina León, Ph.D., is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, and Macondo, and is the author of black god mother this body; Canticle of Idols; Boogeyman Dawn; sombra : (dis)locate;and the chapbooksprofeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She has received fellowships and residencies with The Watering Hole, the Obsidian Foundation, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland, and Ragdale, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She retired early as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person, the first Afro-Latina, and first Boricua to achieve that rank and is now professor emerita there. She supports poets and writers at the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine. León is an enrolled member of Higuayagua Taino of the Caribbean.
Gunpowder’s new partner Letras Latinas strives to enhance the visibility, appreciation, and study of Latinx literature both on and off the campus of the University of Notre Dame with an emphasis on programs that support newer voices, foster a sense of community among writers, and place Latinx writers in community spaces. Letras Latinas is under the direction of Francisco Aragón, who established the initiative in 2004.